John Woodruff was one of 18 African American athletes to take part in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, alongside renowned Olympian Jesse Owens. It was there, deep in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, that Woodruff won the gold in the 800-meter race.

“There was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being a black man,” Woodruff said during a 1996 oral history interview for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “We destroyed his master-race theory whenever we [started] winning those gold medals.”

According to an article in NPR, the 18 athletes together won 14 medals – eight of which were gold. That was a quarter of the 56 medals won by the entire U.S. team.   [Read more…]

To counterbalance the competitive pace of the digital age, and the cacophony of self-help gurus—always more voluble at the start of a new year—urging us to lead “better,” fuller, more productive lives, Alexandra Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker, recently recommended Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann’s 2014 book, “Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze” (see “Improving Ourselves to Death,” January 15th).

But, while Brinkmann’s modern-day ruminations are undeniably in vogue, they are no more edifying than German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s from over a century earlier. Without even the maddening ubiquity of constantly updating, beeping, and otherwise chirping smartphones—that, unless muted, turned off, or, gleefully chucked into the sea—never seem to allow us adequate time for unadulterated reflection (both about ourselves and the world), Nietzsche remarked: “With the tremendous acceleration of life” we are all “like travelers who get to know a land and its people from the train.”

Equally more illuminating than Brinkmann’s minimalist musings is masterful American writer James Baldwin’s take on modern society’s lack of consciousness. In his essay “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist,” Baldwin piercingly observed: “What the mass culture really reflects . . . is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages.”   [Read more…]

The year 1827 saw the first African American owned and operated newspaper called Freedom’s Journal, which operated out of New York. The paper was founded by Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., and other free black men, with John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish working as senior and junior editors respectively.

Despite its mere two-year life span, Freedom’s Journal had a profound impact. Its aim was to discuss issues that mattered to the black community and counter the racist commentary of mainstream media. According to Black Past, a subscription to the Journal cost $3 per year and, at its peak, it circulated in 11 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Haiti, and parts of Europe and Canada.

From PBS:

Freedom’s Journal provided its readers with regional, national, and international news and with news that could serve to both entertain and educate. It sought to improve conditions for the over 300,000 newly freed black men and women living in the North. …

  [Read more…]

By the 1920s a mere 10,000 black Americans were college educated – or about 0.1 percent of the population.

Of that number, in 1921 three black women became the first to receive PhDs: Georgiana Simpson in German philology from the University of Chicago; Sadie Mossell Alexander in economics from the University of Pennsylvania; and Eva Dykes in English philosophy from Radcliffe College. The order is based on their believed commencement schedules that year.

Simpson worked through college, attending Harvard and Clark University before enrolling full time at the University of Chicago at the age of 41. Although Simpson was not Chicago’s first black student, she sparked a protest when she decided to live on campus.   [Read more…]